Related papers: Not Your Average App: A Large-scale Privacy Analys…
Today's mobile platforms provide only coarse-grained permissions to users with regard to how third- party applications use sensitive private data. Unfortunately, it is easy to disguise malware within the boundaries of legitimately-granted…
The Privacy Sandbox, launched in 2019, is a series of proposals from Google to reduce ``cross-site and cross-app tracking while helping to keep online content and services free for all''. Over the years, Google implemented, experimented,…
Mobile gaming apps increasingly rely on third-party Software Development Kits SDKs for advertising, analytics, attribution, and user engagement, potentially introducing privacy exposure beyond traditional permission based risks. Existing…
Third party apps that work on top of personal cloud services such as Google Drive and Dropbox, require access to the user's data in order to provide some functionality. Through detailed analysis of a hundred popular Google Drive apps from…
Third-party libraries (TPLs) have been widely used in mobile apps, which play an essential part in the entire Android ecosystem. However, TPL is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can ease the development of mobile apps. On the other…
In this work we present definitive evidence, analysis, and (where needed) speculation to answer the questions, (1) Which concrete security measures in mobile devices meaningfully prevent unauthorized access to user data? (2) In what ways…
Websites are capable of learning a wide range of information about the platform on which a browser is executing. One major source of such information is the set of standardised Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) provided within the…
Among populations with limited literacy in emerging digital markets, the adoption of mobile phones, combined with comprehension barriers and poor cybersecurity hygiene, has created hidden privacy risks. This paper examines how informed…
Android apps have become a valuable target for app modifiers and imitators due to its popularity and being trusted with highly sensitive data. Packers, on the other hand, protect apps from tampering with various anti-analysis techniques…
With the rapid development of online technologies and the widespread usage of mobile phones among children, it is crucial to protect their online safety. Some studies reported that online abuse and incidents negatively affect children's…
Online tracking is a widespread practice on the web with questionable ethics, security, and privacy concerns. While web tracking can offer personalized and curated content to Internet users, it operates as a sophisticated surveillance…
Protecting personal information privacy has become a controversial issue among online social network providers and users. Most social network providers have developed several techniques to decrease threats and risks to the users privacy.…
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into mobile applications has significantly transformed various domains, enhancing user experiences and providing personalized services through advanced machine learning (ML) and deep learning…
Web communication has become an indispensable characteristic of mobile apps. However, it is not clear what data the apps transmit, to whom, and what consequences such transmissions have. We analyzed the web communications found in mobile…
Android applications collecting data from users must protect it according to the current legal frameworks. Such data protection has become even more important since in 2018 the European Union rolled out the General Data Protection…
To protect users' privacy, legislators have regulated the usage of tracking technologies, mandating the acquisition of users' consent before collecting data. Consequently, websites started showing more and more consent management modules --…
Prior studies on mobile app analysis often analyze apps across different categories or focus on a small set of apps within a category. These studies either provide general insights for an entire app store which consists of millions of apps,…
The widespread use of smartphones in daily life has raised concerns about privacy and security among researchers and practitioners. Privacy issues are generally highly prevalent in mobile applications, particularly targeting the Android…
User tracking is critical in the mobile ecosystem, which relies on device identifiers to build clear user profiles. In earlier ages, Android allowed easy access to non-resettable device identifiers like device serial numbers and IMEI by…
Many internet ventures rely on advertising for their revenue. However, users feel discontent by the presence of ads on the websites they visit, as the data-size of ads is often comparable to that of the actual content. This has an impact…